Winter at the Door (34 page)

Still, he tried. “Y-yes. I mean, it’s nice of him, I—”

The woman laughed, a sound like ice breaking. “That’s what I thought you said,” she told him calmly, then paused, angling her head to give Spud a clear view of her face.

The scar, Lizzie thought, could probably be repaired by a good surgeon, or at least lessened somewhat. But right now it was a terrifying extension of her smile.

“Who,” she inquired, “do you think did this to me?”

Spud got up, fumbling with the gun he held, and opened his mouth to answer or protest.

But before he could, she shot him.

Twice.

The guy entered the clearing again, this time with a rifle in his hands. Scanning around wildly, he searched for where the shots had come from.

Finally his gaze found Spud, who stood swaying. The woman’s first shot had taken his left earlobe cleanly off, along with the ring that had been in it. Lizzie hadn’t seen the second shot hit him. Now she watched as his eyes finally rolled up and he fell. How, the tattooed teenager’s expression seemed to ask, could the universe have betrayed him so completely?

Turning, the woman got off a wild shot in the instant before Chevrier hurled himself at her, shoving her and Lizzie both into the lean-to where the little girl still huddled in terror, then following them in.

“What’s this supposed to accomplish?” Lizzie hissed as he urged her toward where the child crouched.

“That back wall,” he pointed out. “It’s just pine boughs. We can—”

He’d snatched Spud’s gun. Catching on to Chevrier’s plan, Lizzie turned to the woman.

“Start pushing your way through. Not all the way, though, just so you can get out when I signal. And stay alert, we’re only going to get one chance at this.”

The woman nodded. Not stupid, Lizzie realized. You didn’t have to be stupid to get into an awful fix like this. Just in love.

Or something. Lizzie turned to Chevrier. “He knows there’s at least one gun in here. He must’ve left her with the one she’s been firing, probably to use against us if it came to that.”

“But then why didn’t she shoot him just now?”

“I was afraid I’d hit the baby,” the woman said dully as she pushed her way to the rear of the lean-to.

Which explained that. But it didn’t explain why she’d sat there so passively afterward. Unless, like Spud, she’d hung onto the hope that the guy was coming back for her, too?

Stockholm syndrome, Lizzie thought. People could get pretty screwed up in how they felt about their captors, especially if the relationship had started out as something else. After enough time went by, they got confused, unable to tell friend from foe.

Now, though, it was clear that the woman had switched sides.

And they could figure out the why of that part later.

“He’s probably thinking he’d better take us out quick,” Lizzie said.

“Right,” Chevrier began, then yanked her down hard as a line of gunfire stitched through the lean-to’s roof.

They scrambled to where the woman had already made good progress on pushing through the layered pine boughs. Cautiously Lizzie pushed her head the rest of the way out between the prickly branches and peered around the campsite, now fully moonlit.

With the clearing skies, bone-hard cold was setting in, too. Her breath made puffs in the frigid air; she pulled her face in as shouts came from a distance. Those reinforcements Chevrier had summoned were finding their way here, guided by the gunfire, probably, and they weren’t being subtle about it.

So now the guy’d be in even more of a hurry, and Chevrier thought the same. “Good news, bad news,” he uttered in a voice tight with pain, which was when she realized he’d been hit.

And meanwhile we’re pinned down in a goddamned primeval forest by some meth-tweaking loony tune with a weapon …

Chevrier passed her the gun, but to use it she’d have to be able to see the guy. She tugged again at the woven-together pine boughs of the lean-to’s rear wall.

Guy deserves a freaking merit badge, building this thing
, she thought, the rough bark and sap-laden needles jabbing her hands mercilessly. She peered out and suddenly he was …

There
. Forty yards, and he hadn’t seen her. She braced her elbow, leveled the pistol … but now he’d moved, sliding behind a thick-trunked evergreen. Or … had he?

“Damn. He’s circling around,” she told Chevrier.

But which way? Meanwhile help was getting closer, by the sound of it, so maybe Dylan was getting help, too …

If he could be helped. With a pang of anguish, she turned from the thought as Chevrier pushed out alongside her, then angled his head sharply. She followed the gesture, and sure enough, there the guy was again. But she still had no good shot.

Besides … She gathered the woman and little girl close. “Okay, now, when I say so, you’re going to go out this hole …”

She gestured at the gap in the lean-to’s rear wall. “And then you’re going to run. Just keep on running, don’t stop. I’ll come and find you afterward, okay?”

The woman’s dark eyes were not quite focused.
Yeah, killing somebody will do that to you
.

“Okay?” Lizzie demanded again; this time the woman nodded, then grasped the child’s hand just as footsteps sounded, faint creaks on the thin, cold snow.

“Get ready.” Chevrier nodded. The footsteps stopped.

“Go.” Lizzie shoved the woman and little girl out the hole in the lean-to’s wall, then felt Chevrier’s hands doing the same to her. Gunfire lit the campsite in orange flashes.

“Run!” Lizzie ordered as the guy’s weapon fired again, and a pain like a whip’s lash stung her left thigh; she stumbled, cursing her left foot, now dragging instead of sprinting as she fought her way over a snow-covered fallen tree.

Then as she hunched behind it she saw that Chevrier wasn’t with
her. The snow all around lay silent and empty. No sound from the woman or the little girl, either, and she didn’t see the guy with the gun.

She had a moment to wonder where he’d stashed the baby, or worse, if he’d—

“Psst.” A tiny sound from right behind her. Slowly she put her head up out of the snowdrift.

It was the woman, standing in plain sight with the little blond girl peeping fearfully out from behind her, the moonlight slanting almost straight down through the tall trees picking them both out like targets in a shooting gallery.

Jesus
. “Get down,” Lizzie whispered, her words as loud as a shout in the forest silence.

But the woman only smiled enigmatically and shooed the child away from her toward the trees, and what was that all about?

Then Lizzie realized:
She’s making herself a target
. So the little girl could get away …

Hurling herself at them, she grabbed the girl’s thin arm in one hand, the woman’s in the other. “Run, dammit!”

The child obeyed, but the woman struggled free just as a shot whizzed past Lizzie’s ear. Distantly, men’s voices called to one another … too distantly. The guy’s smooth face popped up, staring over the fallen tree at them in grim triumph:
Gotcha!

But then his expression changed, first to a puzzled frown and then to a grimace. Lizzie glanced back. The woman still stood where she had before, but now she gripped the gun.

I never took it from her, in all the commotion I never …

And though her face was frightened, the woman’s hand was steady, as if she braced it on some old inner strength that he hadn’t quite managed to scare or brutalize out of her.

His face relaxed into a look of contempt. “You won’t shoot me,” he said softly. “You know you won’t—”

The woman fired, the thwack of the hammer smacking down a bright sharp sound in the wintry darkness. But nothing happened.

The gun was empty. The guy grinned mockingly.

Focused on his victim, he didn’t notice Lizzie gathering herself.
One lunge
, she told herself.
Hit the body midsection, carry him down and put a fist to his ear …

But halfway over the fallen tree, her bad foot gave out and the remaining one hit the tree’s coating of ice. She fell hard, the impact knocking her breathless, and in the next instant he stood over her, his weapon aimed straight at her face.

I’ll be darned
, she thought wonderingly,
this is it. The time at the very end that we all wonder about, this is
—

A clap of thunder split the night. Clad in his skins and furs, the guy staggered uncertainly and fell backward into the snow, a dark stain spreading around his head.

Lizzie scrambled over and yanked his rifle away, as from behind the fallen tree Missy Brantwell appeared, gripping the handgun she’d shot him with and looking half-dead herself, her lips a bloodless-looking blue in her white face.

Behind Missy, three men in winter gear burst out of the woods. Lizzie struggled up and grabbed the arm somebody held out.

“Chevrier’s over there,” Missy managed, pointing, then paused to gaze down at the man she’d just shot.

The father of her child … Then she turned away decisively, leading Lizzie and the others to where the sheriff lay on his belly, one arm flung out as if trying to haul himself along.

In his hand was a chunk of firewood just the right size to use for a club.
Because he never gave up trying to stop the guy
, Lizzie thought sorrowfully.
He never quit
.

He’s a cop, and that’s his job. Or it was …

But then she saw that he was alive, his chest moving up and down stubbornly. A pair of cops gathered him up, hoisting him into a hurried chair-carry between them. Missy was leaving, too, with the woman and little girl, more cops shepherding them out along the trampled path they’d made through the deep snow, still others moving toward the campsite where they would find Spud. So I don’t have to decide whether or not to tell them he’s there, Lizzie thought. Fortunately for him. Finally only she still stood watching the little girl’s small blond head vanish among the trees, something similar vanishing in her heart, as well.

It was never her. Nicki was never here at all
.

It was all a … what? A lie? A misunderstanding?

Or more likely just a mistake. It happened; leads panned out or they didn’t, and you had to accept that.

That was part of the job, too. “What about Dylan Hudson?” she called after one of the departing cops. “And … did they find the baby?”

“Yeah. Baby’s okay, they found him in the guy’s van out near the road. He was all loaded up and ready to go. I don’t know what he even came back in here for.”

But Lizzie did.
To kill us
. So he’d have a head start, and so that if he did get caught, they couldn’t testify against him.

“And there’s another victim,” he went on, “couple of the other guys are carrying him out, but I don’t know who.”

Dylan
. Fatigue hit her, heavy as a boulder. But unless she wanted to stay here, she had no choice but to go on, didn’t she?

The cop waited, gesturing for her to come along. Probably he was eager to leave, to go home to his wife and family.

Or whoever he had. She would be, if she did. Straightening, she followed his lead through the snow out of the silent woods.

A week later Lizzie pulled the Blazer to the curb outside her office in the northern Maine town of Bearkill.

She’d brought along a snow shovel, but to her surprise, the sidewalk was already cleared. With Rascal shifting impatiently by her side, she put her key in the lock.

“Hey, stranger.” She turned.

“Hey, yourself.” It was Dylan. “I didn’t know you’d been let out of the hospital.”

The other victim that night in the woods had been a passerby who’d stopped to help Spud when he’d first arrived and gotten bowshot for his trouble. His truck hadn’t been found for days, but during the next thaw his blood leaked down onto the road from a melting snowdrift.

His funeral was today. She meant to be there.

“Or,” Lizzie added, struck by a new suspicion, “
did
they let you out?” The gunshot wound had nearly killed him. But he’d rallied, as he so often did.

“Yeah, well,” he allowed. “Only so long a guy can take that foolishness.”

Being in a hospital bed, he meant, from which she gathered he’d signed himself out against medical advice yet again. Now his shoulders looked thinner than she recalled under his topcoat, and his face was even leaner and sharper featured than usual.

But the glint in his eye and his wry, crooked grin were the same old Dylan. “Congratulations on those ex-cop deaths,” he went on. “Sharp, the way you figured that one.”

Lizzie shrugged. “Not really. It was just the way we said, that maybe two or three of the deaths were related, but not all of them.”

So she’d looked at what the smaller number had in common, and bingo, there it was: border crossings. “Daniel wanted to move more product, but to do that he had to expand his supply territory and start bringing the drugs in from Canada.”

And to do
that
, he’d needed a cooperative border guard or two. “The trouble was,” she went on, “once he tried recruiting you, if you turned him down he’d have to …”

Dylan laughed without humor, following her inside, where it still smelled faintly of paint and new carpet. “Yeah, it really was an offer a person couldn’t refuse, huh?”

Because if you did … well, Clifford Arbogast from Caribou and Michael Fontine from Van Buren had refused Daniel’s corrupt job opportunity.

And had suffered the consequences. Dylan made an unhappy face. “And the rest of Chevrier’s pals did kill themselves?”

She shook her head. “Dillard Sprague, the guy whose wife found him dead at the bottom of his porch steps? He really was an accident, I’m pretty sure. As for Bogart and Sirois—”

“The two who shot themselves, supposedly.”

“Right,” she said. “Officially, they were suicides. But I was able to get the medical examiner to reopen their cases and start getting them reclassified.”

Dylan looked impressed. “And how did you do that?”

“One”—she held up a finger—“when I dug into his history a little, I found out Carl Bogart had super-high blood pressure in addition to his other problems. Perfect candidate for a stroke. Which if he’d suffered one while he was carrying that pistol of his and fell with it—”